This blog will follow my eighteen month LDS mission in the South. September 2013–March 2015

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We went to the Washington DC Temple last Thursday! All the missionaries who are going home this month got to go together with President and Sister Wilson. I love the temple. It was such a beautiful experience.

We got about a foot of snow! I have pictures with Flat Stanley at the temple and at the Lincoln Memorial! 🙂 Sister Wilson was an elementary school teacher, so she knows all about Flat Stanley. By the way, we get to finish our email time right now, even though its not a Monday, so yay! Anyway, we went to the temple on Thursday. It was AMAZING. It was beyond that though. I got to see one of the new films that I haven’t seen yet. And the temple is so HUGE! Plus we got to see the visitor’s center very briefly. I bet you know this already, but there are only two temples that have the scale-model temple in the visitor’s center where you can see inside, SLC, and DC! So it was cool to see that. The Spirit was so strong there! I felt so at peace. I am so glad that I got to go! Are we going to do a session together when you come? If so, we need to have family names to do… just an FYI. Plus we have to make an appointment. I would REALLY REALLY like to be able to do that when you guys come to pick me up. Is that possible? https://www.lds.org/church/temples/washington-dc?lang=eng#tab=info

So yeah! They DID move our P-day, but then we were snowed in today and all the libraries closed. It really was like a “state of emergency” for Virginia. At the Kroger all the milk and chips were gone. Cleaned out. People gotta have the essentials I guess! We went to Walmart, and there were two very…backwoodsy (to say the least. trust me) guys in front of us buying two gallons of whole milk, 10 cans of Campbell’s chunky soup, and 1 pack of Kraft singles. Clearly they were stocking up for the week haha. It just seemed funny to me haha. 🙂 I’m very glad I know how to drive in snow though, because if I didn’t we would have had a lot more trouble. We live up a small hill, but with no snow tires and front-wheel-drive only on a small car, we didn’t know if we’d make it up the hill or not. We were watching car after car (there was a small line) try and fail. But I was watching them and saw how they were driving wrong, and just seriously didn’t have any idea how to drive in the snow (like trying to idle up to the hill and apply the gas only when on the actual slope, with no momentum etc.) but we said a prayer that we’d make it up, and you know what! Heavenly Father answers prayers said with faith, because we made it up almost without a hitch.

Our investigator Hannah disappeared last week and missed TWO appointments with us!! We could not get a hold of her and her car wasn’t home either. We finally decided to try driving by one more time to see if she was home, and she WAS! It turns out that during all the bad weather she stayed at her parents house. Anyway she invited us right in, and we asked her if she wanted to have a tour of the church building so she could feel more comfortable when she comes on Sunday. She said “Sure!” We asked her if we could do that right now, and she said yes again! So she followed us to the building and we had a wonderful spiritual tour, and taught her about baptism and confirmation in the font room. She was all geared up to come to church the next day, and we were even going to go over early to help her get her girls ready for church. Then she texted us in the morning and told us she was in the hospital with her grandmother– she fell once earlier this week, then fell again that morning and it was more serious. Sadly, this means that she can’t be baptized on the 14th, which would have been AMAZING because you guys could have been at the baptism! But we’ll see if we can make an exception because I would LOVE for you to see the baptism of someone I taught!!! 😀 BUT she wants to come to January’s baptism on Saturday :D. I know that because she’s starting to recognize the Spirit, her testimony will grow. I love her so much!

ALSO some huge miracles this week– January and her daughter came to church, but her husband also came!!!! Sister Morales translated for him. He only stayed for Sacrament, but it was awesome!! And two less-active families that we have been trying to work with for the past two months showed up too! It was so amazing! Even though Hannah couldn’t come, we still had so many blessings.

“From England, Brother Bennett traveled in the company of Alma Sonne, European Mission president, to Stockholm. At a gathering of LDS mission presidents from across Europe, Brother Bennett impressed upon them his own deep feeling for the immediacy of the work: “I told them I, too, was speaking in behalf of a mission field—more extensive and including more people than all the other missions combined. Despite the fact that it was under the Presidency of the Prophet Joseph Smith and was blessed with labors of numbers of the greatest missionaries for 117 years, not a single baptism had been performed in that mission. They had made converts, perhaps millions of them, but no baptisms [meaning that ordinance cannot be performed in the spirit world; it must be done on earth by proxy]. For their mission to succeed, the records to identify those in the spirit must be gathered from the nations and sent to the temples.”15